10-11-2008, 07:11 PM

hello everyone ..... i bought this western digital external hdd (300 GB) a year ago and it worked fine on PC. ever since i connected it to the MAC it strtd showing USMT.TMP file corrupted and i was able to copy files only from the hdd and not to the hdd. i tried deleting the file but it said IO device error. i then tried formatting the disk using disk utility, but i am not able to as it says resource busy ..... the hdd now does not even show up on the desktop. helpppppppp as i have all my data on the hdd ......

it used to work fine on the PC but now even the pc does not read it ..... is there any way i can get it working ..... i dont find formatting the disk

10-11-2008, 10:17 PM

First off with the external drive connected, boot from the Leopard install DVD, go to Utilities>Disk Utility and see if the external drive shows up. If so format Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and it will be right to use with your Mac.

If this does not work, try connecting to the PC and use the XP disc recovery and format in NTFS and then later connect to the Mac and reformat.

Here is a link describing this more fully:-

Mac OS X disk utility - resource busy error | Christoph Peter

04-02-2009, 04:12 PM

If I have an external drive connected to a PC, that is formatted to NTFS, and I connect it to my macbook in order to format it, will I be able to re-connect it with the PC? I know the PC won't be able to write to it, but I'm hoping I'll still be able to mount the drive to my Macbook and use it for Time Machine.

04-02-2009, 04:21 PM

No, Time Machine needs to back up to an HFS+ formatted disk. For the disk to be readable and writeable in both Windows and OS X, you will want a disk formatted with FAT32 (this doesn't require any extra software).

If you want, you could try the partitioning scheme suggested here should you want to have TM backup to the same drive you want to use for both Windows and OS X.